152	TURKEY IN TRAVAIL
was asked why he had not tried, he sighed and said that
the British would be angry.
I came to Skutari and landed at the little pier where
the porters lounge and smoke. They looked like snails,
for on their backs they carry always a leather hump,
and a porter without a hump would be no porter. They
are mostly Kurds and wild fierce men, godless and
undisciplined. They are the instruments of every
massacre and plot. Some politician had combined them
into a corporation, and they were for ever being unruly
and lawless. They growled and glared unpleasantly
to see me come ashore, for they do not like Christians.
Skutari is quaint and old. Its streets are as steep
as those of Pera, and twist up narrow, intricate passages
where the roadway is of cobbles and the pavements
are narrow and rain-water is shot off the roofs on to
the passer-by. It is a town of twisting slums and then
open spaces and parks, of large-sized hovels and tiny
wooden shops where the shopman sits all day with a
few bags of peas or a bundle of bed-coverlets, and appears
to sell nothing, and yet contentedly at dusk puts up
his wooden shutter and goes to the mosque to pray.
It was all Turk. Fires and troubles had routed
out the few Christians who used to live there. It was a
primitive, fanatical, antiquated place still living in the
seventeenth century. In space it was but twenty minutes
by boat from Europe. In the centuries it was 300 years
away.
They gave me a house by a soft scented park where
the women came to find their lovers. It looked away
down the Marmora and over Stambul to Thrace. My